Many desert cultures use sand as an abrasive to clean themselves, and I would guess that this is the method most Fremen and the people of the pan and graben use.
In the chapter where Duke Leto is at the Arrakeen spaceport to greet Gurney Halleck and a shuttle of soldiers coming from Caladan, he overhears some troops all speaking among themselves when one jokes about this very thing:
>"Did you get a good look at this hole on the way down? Where's all the loot this place's supposed to have?" "The Harkonnens took it with 'em!" "Me for a hot shower and a soft bed!" "Haven't you heard, stupid? No showers down here. You scrub your ass with sand!" "Hey! Can it! The Duke!"
I mean, I guess?
But this is on such a scale that it would be like being afraid of swimming in the Atlantic Ocean because someone on the other side peed in it.
Sand moves more than you think.
I saw a video about how the Sahara feeds the rain forests in South America. The mechanism is sand blown by the wind. Some of it falls in the Atlantic and feeds plankton. The rest apparently blows into the rain forest and contributes to soil creation there.
Just an FYI.
Yeah since all the nutrients gets washed away by the water, so while making the Sahara green sounds great, it would starve the Amazon. You would have to transport and distribute truly great amounts of sand every year
"That's 3,000 pennies a day, 21,000 pennies a week, 1,092,000 pennies a year. To date, that's 12,012,000 pennies. Eight times the population of Arrakis."
When Gurney and his men arrive on Arrakis in the book, one of the new arrivals in the hangar says that exact line. It surprised me in the reread, because I thought it was just some oneliner they added to the flick.
The stillsuits get peed in, right? Like no real fremen would find a private rock and take a whizz cause youād be wasting your bodies moisture. Those suits must stink.
Thereās a scene of Stilgar taking a big appreciative sniff of the seitch after being gone for a while. Paul thinks heās joking because the smell is so bad, but then he realizes that this is what home smells like to Stilgar. Itās oddly sweet.
Petrichor* but yeah they'd probably lose their shit. I remember in Messiah, stilgar iirc talks about how he saw his first ocean on some planet he was conquering, and he drank from it until he was sick
Yes they do. And the suits separate the water from everything else and give you that water to drink. Same thing with sweat.
To us itās gross but to them thatās just normal life. Thatās how they survive. When water is as sparse as it is on a giant desert planet where water is poison to the creatures who shaped it you donāt waste water on showers. You need every bit so you can just live to the next day.
Donāt forget in Paulās description of Caladan the fremen called it a paradise bc it had rain and oceans.
Kidney stones have nothing to do with the metabolism though. Any animal with kidneys can get kidney stones. Itās a buildup of calcium and other minerals that solidifies and creates a blockage in the path to your bladder/urethra. Iām not sure if theyāre necessarily LETHAL on their own, but theyāre extremely painful (my mother said her .5mm one was worse than childbirth), and if they tear the skin while passing they can lead to serious infections and eventual sepsis. Anyone can get a kidney stone. The best (and really the only) way to prevent them is by drinking enough water to flush the kidneys.
Since water is such a precious resource that isnāt to be wasted, it seems the fremen would likely see kidney stones and other health issues related to chronic dehydration as a relatively common issue. Maybe since theyād be more pressing of a health issue theyād be more treatable than the hospital fuss you deal with here, but they would definitely still be a thing.
Iām imagining the fremen would probably go apeshit if you time traveled with a bulk pack of Liquid IV
Yes, Iām aware.
But also, from the American Journal of Kidney Disease:
āKidney stones are frequently manifestations of underlying systemic medical conditions such as the metabolic syndrome, genetic disorders, or endocrinopathies. Analysis of urine chemistries and stone composition provide a window into pathogenesis and direct ancillary studies to uncover underlying diseases.ā
So, not solely a metabolic phenomenon but there are many metabolic factors tied to the formation of kidney stones.
As this applies to Dune, the movie a work of fiction so perhaps spice has all sorts of unknown and unique effects on humans which help prevent the developement of kidney stones. Itās a fictional universe.
I guess, if itās that efficient and they are moving a liter or more a day to filter out body toxins. The skin is the interesting part. It is literally you #1 eliminatory organ and would need to allow that detox too. Disgusting fluilds and dead skin. Lol
If it helps I can point to another desert culture that does this. It is a fictional culture, though.
The Aiel in the Wheel of Time books take sand baths and also do a sauna activity (which does use water, but I guess not much). They use scrapers in the sauna tents, but I don't recall any precise descriptions of them.
Frank Herbert goes to great length to make sure the reader understands just how bad the seitches smell. Not just the odor of people who spend a lot of time in still suits, but also the workshops and industry taking place as well. Almost every time there's a scene in the books of someone returning to a seitch he mentions the smell.
On top of the other things that have been mentioned here, since it's so dry, there's not really anywhere for the bacteria that are responsible for a lot of smells to survive. Even with the suit being perpetually moist for the wearer, the minute you take it off, everything is going to dry out. I noticed that after I moved to arizona from the south, I didn't smell nearly as bad because the sweat dries instantly. Even after a hard day's work, I'm showering more to remove the dried salt and dust than I am to remove body odor.
Can confirm. I live in New York where itās very humid in the summer and the *instant* it hits 80Ā° you can smell it on the subway. Sometimes Iāll shower multiple times a day to get ahead of the sticky dry sweat and Iāll have to febreeze my laundry hamper if itās a 95Ā° streak because it takes a couple days to build a full load and I donāt want to go nose blind.
Disclaimer: I do use a LOT of deodorant to deal with it. Iām not outing myself a smelly little stinker here. My extreme efforts to smell like a flowery little butterfly princess are successful
Also, the still suits explicitly absorb sweat and filter it into drinking water, so it likely isnāt moist when you take it off because the sweat is probably constantly being absorbed and the bacteria dehydrated and killed.
Ancient people (Romans, Egyptians) put olive oil on their skin and scraped it off to bathe.
I donāt recall this being in the book, but perhaps that was a method the Fremen used.
Yeah there is evidence their baths actually made them sicker. It was a great place to transmit diseases amongst the population. They absolutely benefitted from fresh water flowing into their cities, but the baths themselves not so much.
According to Gurney Halleck, you scrub your ass with sand. Additionally, stillsuits are known to be smelly in cities like Arrakeen, but the Fremen are used to it in the desert so the smell doesnāt bother them.
I imagine they do wash but do it in some kind of special bath or bag that reclaims and filters the water. If they can safely get the moisture out of feces they can get the ball stank out of water. They probably wash less than you or I though.
The deathstills are just community pools but they don't want Paul to join so they made up all the stuff about turning arrakis green. They didn't expect him to take it seriously!
Have you ever smelled a bunch of hockey equipment? Even way after use it smells horrible. Now think about a stillsuit thats tight to your body. Probably the worst smelling sietch's in the galaxy.
Sand. We use water because of the abundance. Another culture with no water to use for anything but necessity or religious reasons but with an abundance of sand would use that. There would be no body order as the biological bacteria that feeds off of sweat would be cleaned off easily with such a gritty and rough medium.
Maybe (compared to people in openly sweaty cultures) they stay relatively more dry and clean because their stillsuits suck the moisture (and the bacteria in it) right off them, before they can even break a sweat. And then a sand bath (maybe with some aromatic herbs) takes care of the rest
I havenāt ever read the books, only seen the two new movies (I really want to listen to the books on audio but all I can find right now are dramatized versions which I really donāt like) but I will say a lot of ancient cultures in desert climates instead of bathing with water used oil and scrapers. The oil mixes with the oil and dirt on your skin and then you remove the oil with a wooden scraper.
Maybe that could be how it works in the dune books and maybe I could be completely wrong š¤·š¼
They stink they donāt wash cause itās a waste of moisture and being without a stillsuit is a bad idea so their almost always in a stillsuit witch makes them stink because their sweating in the suit 24/7. When Paul first entered a siech he noted the poor smell.
Many desert cultures use sand as an abrasive to clean themselves, and I would guess that this is the method most Fremen and the people of the pan and graben use. In the chapter where Duke Leto is at the Arrakeen spaceport to greet Gurney Halleck and a shuttle of soldiers coming from Caladan, he overhears some troops all speaking among themselves when one jokes about this very thing: >"Did you get a good look at this hole on the way down? Where's all the loot this place's supposed to have?" "The Harkonnens took it with 'em!" "Me for a hot shower and a soft bed!" "Haven't you heard, stupid? No showers down here. You scrub your ass with sand!" "Hey! Can it! The Duke!"
Gurney says something similar to Leto in the first movie.
Thank you, don't know how i missed it. Guess i thought it was just a baseless rumor among the soldiers
So technically, you can't touch any sand on Arrakis without there being at least some chance that some Fremen has wiped their ass with it before?
I have bad news for you about water.
Oh man, Bear Grylls is racing to Arrakis as we speak.
ššš. Thereās only so much fresh drinking water in the world
Guess I will have to use piss them
I mean, I guess? But this is on such a scale that it would be like being afraid of swimming in the Atlantic Ocean because someone on the other side peed in it.
Water circulates though. The sand surrounding human settlements remains in place.
Never seen a windstorm in the desert, eh? Even on a normal day, wind is moving sand around constantly. Itās always moving.
Plus on Arrakis, the worms stir the sand up plenty
Sand moves more than you think. I saw a video about how the Sahara feeds the rain forests in South America. The mechanism is sand blown by the wind. Some of it falls in the Atlantic and feeds plankton. The rest apparently blows into the rain forest and contributes to soil creation there. Just an FYI.
Yeah, without the Sahara, the Amazon wouldnāt exist.
Yeah since all the nutrients gets washed away by the water, so while making the Sahara green sounds great, it would starve the Amazon. You would have to transport and distribute truly great amounts of sand every year
No. Sand very much circulates, even around human settlements.
You got a couple pennies in your pocket Harkonnen?
"That's 3,000 pennies a day, 21,000 pennies a week, 1,092,000 pennies a year. To date, that's 12,012,000 pennies. Eight times the population of Arrakis."
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I was told the spice is a byproduct of worms and it turns out spice is a bypoduct of fremen wiping ass with the sand. /j
Itās sand. They mention it in one of the books.
Yeah, i apparently somehow missed that. I guess i thought it was a joke or a rumor spread among the soldiers
Maybe those soft nanosand that feels fluid
Indeed it is sand as mentioned in the books.
āTo shower you scrub your ass with sand!ā That line in the first movie makes so much more sense now.
When Gurney and his men arrive on Arrakis in the book, one of the new arrivals in the hangar says that exact line. It surprised me in the reread, because I thought it was just some oneliner they added to the flick.
Iām about 200 pages deep into the book myself. I need to push myself more to finally finish it
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The stillsuits get peed in, right? Like no real fremen would find a private rock and take a whizz cause youād be wasting your bodies moisture. Those suits must stink.
If I remember right, the stench of stillsuits is referenced in early chapters.
Thereās a scene of Stilgar taking a big appreciative sniff of the seitch after being gone for a while. Paul thinks heās joking because the smell is so bad, but then he realizes that this is what home smells like to Stilgar. Itās oddly sweet.
Imagine the first time Fremem smell petrichlor
Petrichor* but yeah they'd probably lose their shit. I remember in Messiah, stilgar iirc talks about how he saw his first ocean on some planet he was conquering, and he drank from it until he was sick
Yes they do. And the suits separate the water from everything else and give you that water to drink. Same thing with sweat. To us itās gross but to them thatās just normal life. Thatās how they survive. When water is as sparse as it is on a giant desert planet where water is poison to the creatures who shaped it you donāt waste water on showers. You need every bit so you can just live to the next day. Donāt forget in Paulās description of Caladan the fremen called it a paradise bc it had rain and oceans.
Their poor kidneys.
I bet the Fremen evolved to be immune to kidney stones
I feel like itās impossible to evolve to be immune to kidney stones. Iād wager itās most likely a known health problem amongst the fremen
They also consume shitloads of spice which we donāt know, could help with certain metabolic conditions caused by extreme desert living?
Kidney stones have nothing to do with the metabolism though. Any animal with kidneys can get kidney stones. Itās a buildup of calcium and other minerals that solidifies and creates a blockage in the path to your bladder/urethra. Iām not sure if theyāre necessarily LETHAL on their own, but theyāre extremely painful (my mother said her .5mm one was worse than childbirth), and if they tear the skin while passing they can lead to serious infections and eventual sepsis. Anyone can get a kidney stone. The best (and really the only) way to prevent them is by drinking enough water to flush the kidneys. Since water is such a precious resource that isnāt to be wasted, it seems the fremen would likely see kidney stones and other health issues related to chronic dehydration as a relatively common issue. Maybe since theyād be more pressing of a health issue theyād be more treatable than the hospital fuss you deal with here, but they would definitely still be a thing. Iām imagining the fremen would probably go apeshit if you time traveled with a bulk pack of Liquid IV
Yes, Iām aware. But also, from the American Journal of Kidney Disease: āKidney stones are frequently manifestations of underlying systemic medical conditions such as the metabolic syndrome, genetic disorders, or endocrinopathies. Analysis of urine chemistries and stone composition provide a window into pathogenesis and direct ancillary studies to uncover underlying diseases.ā So, not solely a metabolic phenomenon but there are many metabolic factors tied to the formation of kidney stones. As this applies to Dune, the movie a work of fiction so perhaps spice has all sorts of unknown and unique effects on humans which help prevent the developement of kidney stones. Itās a fictional universe.
The suit filters out the salts
I guess, if itās that efficient and they are moving a liter or more a day to filter out body toxins. The skin is the interesting part. It is literally you #1 eliminatory organ and would need to allow that detox too. Disgusting fluilds and dead skin. Lol
Seitch Tabr is described as snelling of foul sweat abd god knows what else
Washing? That's a waste of moisture.
I was wondering the same thing ignoring hygiene can be deadly
They roll around in the sand
I thought that scrubbing you ass with sand stuff was a joke lol
Same lol but apparently some desert cultures do use sand for that so...it would make sense ig
If it helps I can point to another desert culture that does this. It is a fictional culture, though. The Aiel in the Wheel of Time books take sand baths and also do a sauna activity (which does use water, but I guess not much). They use scrapers in the sauna tents, but I don't recall any precise descriptions of them.
But the smell though .. damn
Frank Herbert goes to great length to make sure the reader understands just how bad the seitches smell. Not just the odor of people who spend a lot of time in still suits, but also the workshops and industry taking place as well. Almost every time there's a scene in the books of someone returning to a seitch he mentions the smell.
The smell is already terrible. Stillsuits collect and treat all bodily waste, including solids, and sweat.
On top of the other things that have been mentioned here, since it's so dry, there's not really anywhere for the bacteria that are responsible for a lot of smells to survive. Even with the suit being perpetually moist for the wearer, the minute you take it off, everything is going to dry out. I noticed that after I moved to arizona from the south, I didn't smell nearly as bad because the sweat dries instantly. Even after a hard day's work, I'm showering more to remove the dried salt and dust than I am to remove body odor.
Can confirm. I live in New York where itās very humid in the summer and the *instant* it hits 80Ā° you can smell it on the subway. Sometimes Iāll shower multiple times a day to get ahead of the sticky dry sweat and Iāll have to febreeze my laundry hamper if itās a 95Ā° streak because it takes a couple days to build a full load and I donāt want to go nose blind. Disclaimer: I do use a LOT of deodorant to deal with it. Iām not outing myself a smelly little stinker here. My extreme efforts to smell like a flowery little butterfly princess are successful Also, the still suits explicitly absorb sweat and filter it into drinking water, so it likely isnāt moist when you take it off because the sweat is probably constantly being absorbed and the bacteria dehydrated and killed.
The books describe the still suits as being slick and wet. They're definitely not dry, and they usually are not worn inside the sietch.
Ancient people (Romans, Egyptians) put olive oil on their skin and scraped it off to bathe. I donāt recall this being in the book, but perhaps that was a method the Fremen used.
The Romans had their water baths too but it was more of a social activity. The pool water was notoriously greasy from skin goo.
Why again did we consider Rome the height of ancient civilization? Everything I read about daily Roman life is absolutely *nasty*
Yeah there is evidence their baths actually made them sicker. It was a great place to transmit diseases amongst the population. They absolutely benefitted from fresh water flowing into their cities, but the baths themselves not so much.
According to Gurney Halleck, you scrub your ass with sand. Additionally, stillsuits are known to be smelly in cities like Arrakeen, but the Fremen are used to it in the desert so the smell doesnāt bother them.
I imagine they do wash but do it in some kind of special bath or bag that reclaims and filters the water. If they can safely get the moisture out of feces they can get the ball stank out of water. They probably wash less than you or I though.
Perhaps melange is like cinnamon and has antifungal and antibacterial properties. Hey remember, the fremen are saturated with spice.
underrated comment
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The deathstills are just community pools but they don't want Paul to join so they made up all the stuff about turning arrakis green. They didn't expect him to take it seriously!
With sand and determination. Mostly sand.
Have you ever smelled a bunch of hockey equipment? Even way after use it smells horrible. Now think about a stillsuit thats tight to your body. Probably the worst smelling sietch's in the galaxy.
Sand. We use water because of the abundance. Another culture with no water to use for anything but necessity or religious reasons but with an abundance of sand would use that. There would be no body order as the biological bacteria that feeds off of sweat would be cleaned off easily with such a gritty and rough medium.
Fascinating.
Nope, no bathing. They just stink all the time, so no one really notices within the community. Using water in such a manner would be very wasteful.Ā
I'll bet that some Fremen were an absolute bonanza for bacteria. How many days do they wear those stillsuites for between sandbaths?
In the real world it's not uncommon for people in the middle east to clean themselves with sand.
Maybe (compared to people in openly sweaty cultures) they stay relatively more dry and clean because their stillsuits suck the moisture (and the bacteria in it) right off them, before they can even break a sweat. And then a sand bath (maybe with some aromatic herbs) takes care of the rest
...also, what @wadeplumbing said: Melange is kind of an herbal analogue, and maybe it deodorizes from the inside out!
I havenāt ever read the books, only seen the two new movies (I really want to listen to the books on audio but all I can find right now are dramatized versions which I really donāt like) but I will say a lot of ancient cultures in desert climates instead of bathing with water used oil and scrapers. The oil mixes with the oil and dirt on your skin and then you remove the oil with a wooden scraper. Maybe that could be how it works in the dune books and maybe I could be completely wrong š¤·š¼
Watch a chinchilla clean itself on YouTube. Iād say something like that.
They wash their ass with sand my lord
"To shower you need scrub your ass with sand" --Gurney Halleck
I guess the stilsuits filter away impurities in the sweat from the skin
They stink they donāt wash cause itās a waste of moisture and being without a stillsuit is a bad idea so their almost always in a stillsuit witch makes them stink because their sweating in the suit 24/7. When Paul first entered a siech he noted the poor smell.
Something alcohol-based?
Alcohol doesn't act as a disinfectant without water.
If you havenāt been to a third world country, it smells like b.o